


ashes to ashes

by hiza-chan (callunavulgari)



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Zombies, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-26
Updated: 2012-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-30 03:40:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/327346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/hiza-chan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roxas is seventeen, and he doesn't remember what it feels like to be a lord.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ashes to ashes

**Author's Note:**

> For darthvair_65. I've owed you this for a while now—not quite as long as I owed Rae hers, but too long. I apologize in advance because there is no way this is as Victorian as you wanted, and that it's probably ridiculously inaccurate. But that's okay, right? So, to you, with love and machetes.

The world burns when Roxas is eighteen. Oh, it's been burning for years, but when it really stops—when the world goes up in smoke and rot, Roxas clings to Axel and wishes they'd had more time.  
  
Axel laughs, his nails biting into the tender flesh of Roxas' wrist, and kisses him one last time.  
  
Roxas chokes on the smoke and smothers his last gasp of air against Axel's lips.  
  
The fires close in around them, and Roxas can't feel his skin burning, though he can see it—flesh sloughing off bones. His brain is boiling inside his own skull, and he can only feel Axel.  
  
He supposes that this is the way things should end; the same way it started—with flames and hot air blistering the inside of his throat and Axel at his side.  
  
He thinks that maybe he's okay with it ending this way.  
  
.  
  
Roxas was five years old when the infestation spread. Whenever he mentions this to other survivors, they stare at him incredulously, brows raised and lips gaping. Because surely—surely he was joking?  
  
Roxas knows how the world is. He isn't quite as blind as he once was.  
  
Children did not survive long in this world that they now call their own. And if they did, it was only for a year or so. Never into adulthood.  
  
Roxas has no doubt that if Axel had not been there for him, he would have been amongst them.  
  
In this new world, it no longer matters how rich Roxas' parents were- or that he'd grown up with marble beneath his feet and a Grande piano at his fingertips; that his earliest memories were of gold edged ceilings and crystal chandeliers that twinkled and chimed in the candlelight.  
  
It's hard to remember a time where it really mattered that Axel was sneered at during parties and Roxas was reprimanded for playing with the dirty urchin a few miles down the road.  
  
Roxas was five when the infection spread, and Axel was thirteen and already engaged to a woman with a pleasant enough dowry.  
  
Axel never told Roxas the girl's name- the one he was supposed to wed. But again, another useless fact that will never be worth hearing. In the end, Axel didn't spare the girl a thought.  
  
In the end, Roxas is the one he came for.  
  
.  
  
He has few memories of the actual night. There was the screaming, something that will always stay with him. The sound of an entire town shrieking with fright, back when there were enough living people to make the sound carry. Back when there were enough people that the wailing caused the ears to bleed.  
  
He will never remember his parents on that night, though looking back, they must have been turned early on.  
  
He remembers his brother; Sora's glower as he tucked Roxas behind a cabinet, always the braver of the two of them. How he'd hushed Roxas, paying no heed to the fact that his own voice was shaking, that his tiny hands were no bigger than Roxas', nor were they any more likely to fight off the horde.  
  
"Brother, stay here. I'll find papa and we'll fetch the horses."  
  
He had sobbed about how he didn't want to wait there, how he wanted to go with Sora. There was smoke in the air, a grease fire in the kitchens that had spread, and he had choked on it.  
  
Sora had kissed his cheek and grabbed a fire poker, and left him locked in the room.  
  
He hadn't seen his brother again. Not as a walker, or an actual corpse. In the earlier days, he liked to pretend that he'd survived. Playing out a grand adventure in his own head- his twin brother, brave and caring, the hero who had maybe managed to find his servant friend in the kitchens and the little princess down the way. A hero; a five year old against a world of monsters with snapping teeth.  
  
It was a nice thought, at least. Kept him sane some nights.  
  
Axel found him behind that cabinet later, wiped away his snot and whispered, "You have to be brave now, Rox. The house is burning and we need to get you out."  
  
Roxas can only vaguely remember the walk past the corpses, both those spilt all over their nice marble floor and the ones still shambling around the courtyard, the foyer, the dining room.  
  
He certainly doesn't remember anything past that, or how Axel managed to keep them alive for even one night, much less weeks afterward.  
  
He remembers being a righteous little terror, though, once he came back to himself enough to recognize his surroundings. Screaming fits when he didn't get breakfast and temper tantrums when Axel didn't do what he wanted. It was a wonder that Axel kept him around at all, really.  
  
The fact that the dead were walking didn't really matter to him at first. He was young- at an age where most young lords are still sobbing for their mothers teat and whining about their riding lessons. Going from spoilt rotten to dirt poor and stinking of your own filth is a difficult thing to come to terms with when you're five, even before the dead started to walk.  
  
Eventually, Axel had managed to hammer it into his head.  
  
"Quiet Roxas."  
  
and  
  
"Hold this hatchet, Roxas. Yes, now swing it for me. That tree, there. Perfect."  
  
and  
  
"Even if they look like someone you once knew, they are not. Even if they look like me, do you understand, Rox?"  
  
and  
  
"Remember Rox, what do you do if one of them looks like me?"  
  
_Aim for the head. Keep away from the mouth. Don't let it bleed on you. Don't cry._  
  
**Run.**  
  
They passed the years going house to house- sleeping in high branches occasionally, but only if they had to. Neither of them wanted a repeat of the night Axel turned fourteen, when they woke to a group of walkers snapping at their heels.  
  
By the time Roxas turned six, he knew how to use a crossbow, a knife, a machete, a hatchet, and whatever pointy object he could get his hands on as a weapon. He knew how to tell if a group was nearby or what to do if he was cornered.  
  
As a result, he grew up clever and quick, nimble-fingered and fleet of foot.  
  
He knew exactly which crevasses to squeeze himself, and how to scale a tree faster than a wild cat.  
  
When he was ten, they started staying in safe houses. Axel liked to keep to the stables, bedding down in the loft, where they'd have ample warning before the dead came snapping. Roxas liked the trees, even if it was near impossible to get clear if the zombies cornered you in one.  
  
Years of fighting for your life isn't the most difficult thing if it's literally all you've got left to live for.  
  
.  
  
There's an incident when he's twelve that he knows still haunts Axel's dreams. No one's fault, really, just a silly mistake—but Axel hasn't stopped blaming himself since.  
  
The safe house Axel had picked out wasn't as safe as they thought, as it turned out, and it ended with a bloody arm for Roxas and a hatchet that Axel kept braced against the curve of his skull for over three hours. In that time, Roxas had the time to accept his inevitable death, should it come to pass.  
  
Roxas is only thankful that the death in question never did come to pass, because while he accepted it with grace, Axel never did.  
  
.  
  
Roxas is not extremely fond of their current safe house.  
  
This, however, does not say much on the state of the house considering that he dislikes nearly _all_ of their safe houses- but this one is especially off putting. Most of the time they tend to take refuge in old run down barns- or perhaps a house that has been vacated by several frightened peasants, the bowels of the home scraped clean of all the things that people _think_ they need. Food, clothes, scratchy wool blankets. They take their carriages more often than not, hitching a prized mare or their best stallion to it while they leave the rest of the animals to be devoured in their stalls.  
  
That's one of the things that Roxas had learned rather quickly- the dead did not discriminate. The walkers, while some argue that they seem to prefer human flesh, are content to ravage a nearby hen or a cow or any other type of living, breathing creature.  
  
Another thing he'd learned is that taking a carriage is a mistake.  
  
Most people with enclosed carriages seemed to feel safer beyond the flimsy walls as one of their servants managed the horses outside. Those peasants that were wealthy enough to own carriages thought that even if it wasn't an enclosed vehicle, they would still have an advantage by being on higher grounds than the walkers.  
  
Neither of these rumors are factual. Enclosed carriages normally resulted in the human becoming trapped inside, their servants throat torn out and their prized animals intestines being tugged between grey and rotting teeth. While the humans cowered inside, the zombies would feast, and when they were done would turn their attention to the flimsy paneling, peeling it away like the shell of a boiled egg in order to get to the meat inside.  
  
The horses were loud. Hooves click-clacking on the beaten soil, the smell of their sweat, blood, and fear calling the walkers for miles around. Horses were easy prey, too domesticated to pay much attention to their instincts.  
  
As for the food- a pack or two could never hurt. It saved time; pulling moldy bread from a satchel was far easier than worrying about catching your own meal in the zombie infest forest. Weighing yourself down with changes of clothes-blankets was foolish.  
  
Hygiene was pretty far down on the list of priorities for most people these days. A pair of trousers and a well made shirt would last for months if you made it that far.  
  
This particular safe house was not like that. Moth eaten, web ridden portraits still lined the walls, somber grey eyes glaring out at them from the safety of their canvases. The rugs were plush, though stained with various body fluids and the occasional chunk of flesh. The house was too big- too many rooms that they hadn't explored and too many shadowy corners where death could be lurking.  
  
Roxas doesn't like it. It reminds him too much of home.  
  
.  
  
Roxas is fourteen when Axel sits him down and whispers to him, quiet and horrified, that he's probably going to go through some changes soon. That he has to accept them.  
  
Roxas is fifteen before he realizes what Axel means.  
  
(He thinks that maybe Axel hadn't known- that he'd been referring to the ladies they occasionally met on the road, dust and grime hardly disguising the fact that their breasts were loose beneath their blouses or the fact that they sometimes looked at Axel like he was more than just a welcome face in a dead world.  
  
Maybe Axel had thought Roxas would look at _them_ and feel that first surge of arousal- strange and unfamiliar, as if he was going to be sick and smile and cry all at once.  
  
He thinks that Axel hadn't known that when it came, it would be while watching him grin at Roxas, a hand low on some woman's waist, and that it wasn't the woman's waist he was looking at, but Axel's lips.)  
  
.  
  
They're never far from each other, and as such, there isn't much privacy for Roxas to really explore his own body.  
  
It's like an itch that he can't quite scratch, hard in his pants more often than not, the scratch of cotton against his flesh nearly driving him mad.  
  
He takes to slamming doors, and stomping around while doing his damned best to show that he's irritated.  
  
Axel never seems to know what to make of it, like Roxas has had a bit of a relapse and gone back to being five, throwing a tantrum because Axel couldn't get him anything for breakfast.  
  
When they meet a girl at the edge of the mountains and Axel slinks away with her, Roxas pretends he isn't jealous. Because he isn't. Not really.  
  
And the fact that he shoves his hand down his breeches when the wind carries whispers of Axel's cries back to him is entirely a coincidence.  
  
.  
  
Roxas is sixteen, and he is sick of watching.  
  
He is sick of waiting.  
  
He is sick of the girls and their tits, the wild way their hair curls down their backs.  
  
He is sick of watching Axel stroll off with them.  
  
So when they encounter a girl and her sister along the outskirts of what used to be London, Roxas doesn't wait for Axel to give in to the older girls wicked smirk. He looks at the younger of the two; dark haired, small, and pale—the way that she smiles shyly at him and drags her away from the others, ignoring the way the girl's sister wolf whistles over her shoulder.  
  
He looks back once, just in time to see Axel's look of shock melt into a frown.  
  
.  
  
The girl is nice and clever and just as quick as him. They have sex just once—an uncomfortable affair that involves awkward elbows and nervous giggles. When the walkers shamble out of the trees later that night, Roxas is pleasantly surprised that she's just as good to have watching his back as Axel. Better even.  
  
He thinks about leaving with her.  
  
As he's yanking a branch out of a walker's eye socket, he tells her so.  
  
She laughs and throws him a fond look over her shoulder, getting a bit creative with a pinecone and a slingshot to bring one of hers down. The laugh eases into a soft smile. "You would never do that to him and you know it."  
  
When they stumble back into camp, gore streaked and exhausted, to the sight of Axel's hips pumping between the blonde's legs, Roxas can't bring himself to care much. He just settles against the girl, Xion, and watches Axel sleepily.  
  
As his hips begin to stutter and lose rhythm, Axel glances up- catches sight of him across camp- catches sight of him _watching_ -  
  
Axel comes with a whimper, his eyes open and locked on Roxas the entire time.  
  
.  
  
Roxas is seventeen, and he hates their safe house because it reminds him of home.  
  
Roxas is seventeen, and Axel is pressing lazy kisses to his temple.  
  
Roxas is seventeen, their blankets are scratchy, and there are paintings of dead people hanging in the hall.  
  
Roxas is seventeen, and the world doesn't remember that Axel used to be the stable boy down the street.  
  
Roxas is seventeen, and he doesn't remember what it feels like to be a lord.  
  
Roxas is seventeen and he has a year to live.  
  
He's never been happier.


End file.
